Proceedings of the 1st Chinese-Austrian Workshop on Environmental Odour: Emission-Dispersion-Impact Assessment

In the last decades, environmental unpleasant odours have become a serious concern caused by the awareness of the population in respect to human health and wellbeing issues. Odour exposure may short time not acutely represent a risk for human health, but the exposure causes different negative effects, ranging from emotional stress to physical symptoms. As a matter of fact, environmental odours are considered to be major causes of public complaints. Residents living near odour emitting sources complain to local authorities, regional or national environmental agencies or directly to the personnel involved with the odour emitting source for problem reduction or elimination. Therefore odour is on the top agenda in the field of air quality programs of environmental agencies all over the world.

In general odour emission can be handled like any other airborne pollutant. Starting with the release of the odour at an emission rate depending on the source, the emitted odorous substances are dispersed in the atmosphere. This dilution process can be calculated by various dispersion models, which permit the assessment of the odour exposure. By national odour impact criteria this exposure is calculated to decide if odour annoyance can be expected at a certain site. The odour chain, which starts with the emission and ends with the perception of a resident, was the framework of the 1st Chinese-Austrian Workshop on Environmental Odour held in Tianjin, China in February 2015. The contributions to this workshop are published in this issue of the Austrian Contributions to Veterinary Epidemiology. The workshop was successful to stimulate the dialogue between China and Austria on air pollution and to develop innovative and successful strategies to handle environmental odour.

This bilateral meeting laid paths for the community of scientists involved in odour assessment to achieve a better understanding of the specific aspects connected to odour problems. The major goal was to stimulate research activities and co-operations in the field of environmental odour.

The workshop as well as the current publication of the Austrian Contributions to Veterinary Epidemiology was funded by Eurasia-Pacific Uninet as a network which aims at establishing contacts and scientific partnerships between Austrian universities and member institutions in East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia and the Pacific region. This Chinese-Austrian workshop was hosted by Prof. Dr. Qing-Hao Meng at the School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Tianjin University. He and his team deserve gratitude for the successful organisation on site and his Austrian counterpart Prof. Dr. Günther Schauberger from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna for initiation and organisation of the meeting. Both were the guest editors for this issue.